Dark Sector

Shedding light on one of PS3's grittiest games

The surprise isn’t that developer Digital Extreme’s action thriller is a Resident Evil 4 rip-off- after all, they’ve made a career of ‘borrowing’ from other games, most notably Pariah on Xbox, a blatant Halo clone- but that Dark Sector looks so polished, despite being wonky at best only six months earlier. Even the plot feels familiar: Lead man Hayden Tenno (a dead ringer for Leon) blasts and hacks his way through the fictional eastern European city of Lasria. Then there’s the mysterious Technocytes disease killing off the locals, which you can liken to RE’s T-Virus. But if Dark Sector manages to deliver half the thrills of its mentor then we’re in for a treat.

As it stands, it’s a seriously promising game. The version we’re playing now might contain more bugs than a New York City public toilet, but these should be sorted before it hits the shelves. Hayden’s an uncompromising killing machine. We’re introduced to him in a grimy warehouse at the beginning of the game, which- to start with- is played out in near-black and white.